Army lags in weapon exposure safeguards
Concerns persist over brain health
FORT CHAFFEE, Ark. — A blast shattered the stillness of a meadow in the Ozark Mountains on an autumn afternoon. Then another, and another, and another, until the whole meadow was in flames.
Special operations troops were training with rocket launchers again.
Each operator held a launch tube on his shoulder, a few inches from his head, then took aim and sent a rocket flying at 500 mph. And each launch sent a shock wave whipping through every cell in the operator’s brain.
For generations, the military assumed that this kind of blast exposure was safe, even as evidence mounted that repetitive blasts may do serious and lasting harm.
In recent years, Congress, pressed by veterans who were exposed to these shock waves, has ordered the military to set safety limits and start tracking troops’ exposure. In response, the Pentagon created a sprawling Warfighter Brain Health Initiative to study the issue, gather data and propose corrective strategies. And last year, for the first time, it set a threshold above which a weapon blast is considered hazardous.
Despite the order, though, things have hardly changed on the ground. Training continues largely as it did before. Troops say they see little being done to limit or track blast exposure. And weapons like shoulder-fired rockets that are known to deliver a shock wave well above the safety threshold are still in wide use.
The disconnect fits a pattern that has repeated for more than a decade: Top leaders talk of the importance of protecting troops’ brains, but the military fails to take practical steps to ensure safety.
“It’s extremely frustrating,” said Paul Scharre, a former Army Ranger and
a policy expert at the Center for a New American Security who published a report in 2018, funded by the Defense Department, about the dangers of repeated blasts from firing weapons. “We’ve known for years that these weapons are dangerous. There are simple things we can do to protect people. And we’re not doing them.”
Nowhere is that disconnect more clear than on the firing range at the military training center in the Ozarks, Fort Chaffee in Arkansas.
With flames still leaping from the meadow, a few of the special operations troops walked to a pair of air-conditioned trailers just behind the firing line, where a research team drew blood samples, strapped sensors to their heads and ran tests, searching for evidence of brain injuries.
Measurements taken by the team from scores of troops over three years showed that in the days after firing rockets, they had worse memories and reaction times, worse coordination, lower cognitive and executive function and elevated levels of proteins in their blood that are markers of brain injury.
Sensors placed on the operators’ helmets and body armor showed that the rocket launcher they were firing — the Carl Gustaf M3 — delivers a blast that is often twice the recommended safety threshold.
But when the research team finished running tests, the operators walked right back out and started firing again.
Dr. Michael Roy, the lead researcher, said he designed the five-year study to deliver the kind of empirical data that could help the military make better decisions.
“The question is, does this affect performance?” he said. “We are seeing it does.” He added, “If you are on a mission and you can’t remember things and your balance is off, that could be a real problem.”
Research by his team and others suggests that troops appear to recover after a few days or weeks, just as people recover from concussions. But, as with concussions, there is growing concern that repeated exposure may lead to permanent brain damage and serious long-term consequences for mental health.
A 2021 Navy study of the records of 138,000 service members found that those in career fields with more blast exposure had an increased risk of developing anxiety disorders, depression, migraines, substance abuse problems, dementia and a number of psychiatric disorders, including schizophrenia. And an investigation by The New York Times found that many soldiers and Marines who were exposed to blast waves from firing heavy artillery in Syria and Iraq came home with life-shattering mental and physical problems.
Special Operations Command said in response to questions from the Times that it plans to keep using the Carl Gustaf rocket launcher but sparingly, because of its “potential negative effects.” But the command has taken steps to reduce blast exposure for instructors and assistant gunners, it said, and now requires them to stand farther away when a gunner fires.
During the recent training observed by the Times, none of those safety steps could be seen.
In 2010, at the request of the military, David Borkholder, a professor of engineering at Rochester Institute of Technology in New York, and a team from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency developed a small, wearable gauge to measure blast exposure.
The agency fielded the blast gauge on about 10,000 troops sent to Afghanistan in 2011, intending to measure blast exposure from roadside bombs. But researchers analyzing the data instead found that 75% of the troops’ exposure was coming from their own weapons.
Rather than expand the blast gauge program, though, the Army quietly shelved it in 2016. The Army said at the time that it did so because the gauges did not provide consistent and reliable data.
For two years, Borkholder pressed the Army surgeon general and members of Congress to revive the program. Without real-time monitoring, he argued, the military was blind to the risks. He said he made no progress.
Merely issuing the gauges to service members might reduce exposure significantly, several researchers said. Time and again in recent studies that equipped troops with gauges and let them see their exposure, the troops have changed their behavior on their own to avoid blasts.
Though a congressional mandate passed in 2018 requires monitoring of blast exposure, the Pentagon is still studying how to go about it. Special Operations Command said in 2019 that it would start issuing gauges to all its operators, but four years later only those taking part in research studies have them.
Special Operations Command told the Times that its blast gauge program was in the “final development stage.”
In the field, troops say they see things changing but not enough.
Cory McEvoy was a special operations medic who left the Army in August. While in uniform, he pressed for better tracking of blast exposure so that when career special operators started to fall apart, the military might recognize their conditions as an injury caused by their service.
He said in a recent interview that he was disappointed that there was still no system in place.
“At a policy level, they are talking about all this incredible stuff,” he said. “But at my level, I never saw any of it. And if I’m not seeing it, you can be sure a regular infantry platoon isn’t seeing it.”